Bluescreening a night time scene

[Tom Matthies]

Shoot the background plate as you want it to appear in the final shot. That would be the bed with the “moonlight” falling onto it. Then shoot the actress on blue or green screen as you would normally do. Make sure that the actress is away from the green/blue backing so you can light her independently from the backing. It will be a bit tricky since she cannot lie right on the backing. You won’t be able to light her correctly if she is in contact with it. You will need to get some distance away and let the light mostly fall off of her while the light on the backing remains strong and even. Attempt to light her in the same manner that you lit the background plate she will be composited over. Light her from the same direction and use the same effects or gels that you used on the background. It will be a challenge to position her so she looks like she’s floating AND also keep a full green screen in the background. Don’t worry about shooting off of the backing. As long as she has some of the backing around her on the screen, you can garbage-matte out everything else.
It might be possible to build a supported platform just wide enough for her to lay in with pipes or something strong and thin to support this platform. At any rate, if lit correctly, the green/blue backing will drop out and you should see youactress over the background plate. Keyframe the actress and she will appear to float over the bed. You could add a collor correction filter after the chroma key filter and tweek the color to blend into the background realistically. Definitely going to be a challenge to do.
If she doesn’t need to move around at all (sleeping soundly?) simply shoot the frame with her in it and with the desired lighting and then use a graphics program such as Photoshop to “cut” her out of the background and use the resulting still as a graphic elememt with an alpha channel and composite her in over the background shot. Easy!
tom

[Rennie Klymyk]

Hi, just some thoughts to offer
Moonlight is typically monochromatic – blue and black, so green screen is it.
If the moon is high in the sky it will illuminate more of the top of the bed and the woman (with more desaturated colors) but if it is low in the sky it will be mostly edge lighting with a lot of blackness at the camera side. Where she touches the bed should be black but as she rises the edge light would start to appear beneath her too and on the surface of the bed. Her clothing (I imagine semi transperent gown) would hang down as would her hair and really catch the light. A low camera angle would demonstrate the height off the bed best but would need to show the clothing unfolding off the bed till it no longer touched the bed and just hung.

If you had a wide shot of just the empty bed from above it could be edited in for the receding bed illusion. You could do a green screen shot straight down on her and have the composite of the bed shrink behind her so it looked like she was traveling away from the bed then cut to a side shot where she was already suspended.

You would want to suspend her from cables lying on a fine board(green) so the clothing and hair hangs down. Maybe consider hiring David Copperfield for this one.

Trying to think of movies where similar things have been done all I can recall is “Imortal Beloved” the scene where young Beethoven is running and running to escape his father’s wrath and he gets to his sanctuary, the pond and lays down in it looking up to the stars. The overhead shot gets wider and wider untill somewhere in there we are seemingly transformed from looking down at the reflection to looking up to the heavens where he disappears into the constellations. It was miraculously concieved and executed and evokes a feeling that is repeated during the performance at the end of the movie in which Beethoven performs ode to joy and the same starry sky is painted in the hall as a backdrop. POWERFULL
Just thought of “Kissed” the contoversial film dealing with necrophilia with Molly Parker and “The Excorsist” but I don’t distinctly recall the floating scenes in these movies very clearly or if there even are any.